


Every Crooked Branch on the Tree

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Episode: s02e05 News Night with Will McAvoy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 09:02:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5042227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months after Mac's return from Jamrud, her muscles are still mending, her bruises still fading from purple to brown to yellow, her ligaments still returning to shape. When Will is trapped in an emotional blast radius of his own, they are finally forced to confront their traumas, individual and collective. Elsewhere, funeral arrangements for John McAvoy proceed in a quiet Nebraska farming community. Sequel to <i>Find a Map and Draw a Straight Line.<i></i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Crooked Branch on the Tree

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** As some of you may remember, when I finished [Find a Map and Draw a Straight Line](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3523283/chapters/7748783) I mentioned that there would be a sequel. If any of you still care, that sequel is now here. It takes place about eight weeks after the end of _Find a Map_ on the night of John McAvoy's death. Like _Find a Map_ it'll lean towards being an ensemble piece, but this time with more of a Will emphasis. Warnings for... well most of the things one has to warn for when writing Will-centric fic. Rating will almost definitely change. 
> 
> Chapter titles are lyrics from "The Crooked Kind" by Radical Face.

She has to feed him the entirety of the final segment, word for word. And while she was involved in the earlier interview prep and has produced the Tyler Clementi story every step along the way, she’s not a lawyer. But, she supposes as she slowly intones sentence after sentence into her microphone, it’s better than Will trying to forfend Jesse Whatshisface from seizing the suicide of one of his peers as his moment in the spotlight.

In the last forty-five seconds something shifts and switches back on behind his eyes, and her voice slows and drops into silence as he manages to finish the show without her help.

Not waiting for Herb to say that they’re clear, Mac fumbles her headset and mic kit to Neal and strides out of the control room and into the studio. Jim calls after her, but she ignores him. She figures he’s used to that, after so many years, and knows that he’ll know to take over for her. He’s Jim, after all.

At the anchor desk Will sits motionless.

Rooted, Mac thinks. Like a tree.

Blinking slowly, he begins to unlock his limbs, and looks up at her. “Is Sloan okay?”

“Don’s with her, last I checked.”

Wedging her front teeth into her bottom lip, she tamps down on the innate urge to ask him if he’s okay — it took him thirty seconds to look up from his cards when they came back from commercial. _I guess it’s just us now._ Mac winces; she expects Charlie will be down any moment now, demanding an explanation. _Fuck._

“Oh,” he replies, voice distant. “Good.”

She is overly aware of her breath as it passes through her nostrils. Will makes no indication that he has any intentions of moving; his frame turns rigid again, his hands flattening out over the desktop.

“Honey?” she says, gently placing a hand on his shoulder, wincing when he winces. “You have to get changed.”

A shaky exhale creeps up from chest, rolling through him.

“Right.”

Her stomach twists and turns into relentless knots.

“Come on,” Mac murmurs, wrapping an arm around his shoulder.

 _People are going to start to notice. People already have noticed._ And while Jim and Maggie and Neal and the rest of their sorry senior staff will keep to a distance, people will start to talk and she’d rather minimize the material they have to speculate about. She hasn’t recovered from the worst of the soft tissue damage done to her body in the blast radius of the Jamrud bombing, but his non-reaction to her suggestion has her pulling him out of the chair.

The ligaments in her hips protest vehemently, scar tissue and swollen muscle joining the yawning stretching pain in her lower half. It must show in her face, because Will’s face clears and he stands of his own accord.

Grimacing, she hands him his BlackBerry.

“Mac?”

Straightening — without realizing that she had bent nearly in half to compensate — she shakes her head. “It’s fine.”

But his hands have traced the fluorescent bruises on her pelvis and thighs, and he was in the room when Katherine removed her stitches one by one. And in the days before that, he changed their dressings and dabbed them dry and kept them clean for her, when she was too stiff and sore to bend to do it herself.

“You need to get changed,” she says. “And then I’m taking you home.”

“I need to re-tape that last segment for the West Coast,” Will mumbles, eyes darting about from camera to camera, lighting kit to lighting kit.

_Fuck._

“No,” Mac desperately assures him, trying to work out a solution in her head that doesn’t involve Will being around people for longer than strictly necessary. “No, we can — we can just edit out the beginning and put the full Zimmerman 911 tape in the C block. It’ll all work out. It’s fine.”

Of his own volition, Will lurches towards the studio door.

Pain still flaring up and down her legs, Mac stumbles after him. She’ll need to catch Jim, at some point. And Maggie. Then her thoughts turn back towards John fucking McAvoy, and she wonders if she’d be overstepping her bounds to get Tess to work her magic and procure a flight to Lincoln, Nebraska.

“Honey?” She lags one step behind him as he bolts towards his office. Blindly, it seems, as she has to catch him from barreling into the door. “Will?”

His foot catches on the leg of his desk; he trips but catches himself, bracing himself on his bookshelf and then pushing through the bathroom door and landing on the sink. His fingers grip the lip of basin, knuckles turning white. Shoulders hunching, he folds at the waist, his face disappearing from the mirror.

Mac decides to not turn on the light. Rather, she leans in the doorway, watching him.

“What do you need me to do?” she asks, softening her voice to a murmur.

He shakes his head.

Folding her arms under her chest, Mac drops her chin towards her chest. His jacket needs to come off, she thinks. His tie. She needs to get these clothes back to wardrobe and him into something less constricting, and then she needs to put him in a taxi and send him to his apartment. She needs to clean this up with Jim and Maggie, explain things to Charlie, and then go home to him. Help him figure out what he wants to do.

In his pocket, his BlackBerry vibrates.

_Fuck._

His sister, she thinks. Which one, he didn’t say. Liz, probably. She doubts Fiona would done anything but hang up on whichever Emergency Room employee was tasked with finding a next of kin to claim John McAvoy. Liz, however, is suitably responsible and must be suffering the unfortunate coincidence of working in the surgical department of the medical center where her estranged father just died.

And as for Will’s _brother…_

“Nothing,” Will answers breathlessly. “It’s… I’m… I just need to...”

His phone stops vibrating.

Then it starts again.

“Let me help you. Do you want me to help you?” She edges closer, the toe of her heels scraping over linoleum tile. When he doesn’t move towards or away from her, she sidles up to next to him, and reaches tentatively into the front pocket of his trousers. She takes his phone, and he doesn’t stop her; without looking at if it’s one of his sisters or his brother, she silences his phone and places it face down on the toilet.

Fingers curling and uncurling, she reaches next for his tie. Nimbly she undoes the knot and slides it off his neck, dropping it on top of the toilet lid next to his BlackBerry.

Jacket next.

She doesn’t understand. And she can’t. But she knows that Will has spent fifty years living in a world where his father was in it, a vibrant reminder that he was in some way defective and flawed for the singular reason that the person who was supposed to love him the most and unconditionally in the world did not — and then of course, how or _why_ would anyone else? And Mac doesn’t understand, she can’t. For all the quirks and dysfunctions in her own far-flung family, the fears of abandonment to dangerous posts and the thrill of panic that comes with the toppling of regimes and the redrawing of borders, she was never led to believe that she was inherently bad, inherently unlovable, inherently fractious and incomplete. So she cannot understand. But she does _know._

He’s holding the sink so tightly that his arms begin to tremble and shake, but she says nothing, merely tries to devise a way to get his jacket off.

“Just get changed,” she suggests, rubbing her hands up and down the sides of his arms. “And then we can go home.”

“I need to go to — I need a flight out to Lincoln.” Bowing his head so that his chin nearly touches his chest, he struggles to breathe. “Someone has to take care of this. God knows my brother isn’t going to — and Fiona’s in Atlanta and she’s too — it wouldn’t be fair, and Liz shouldn’t have to do this.”

 _Neither should you,_ she thinks, and desperately wants to say. _So leave him unclaimed. Let him be buried in an unmarked grave on government property. Let the farmhands throw him into one on the farm. It’s not like the church will accept him into their cemetery._ But they will, of course. She remembers Will saying that his mother had bought two plots in the local Catholic graveyard, his father’s proclivities as inconsequential to her in death as they had been in life.

_He was your son._

Sighing softly, she presses her face into his back.

“I’ll come, if you want me to.”

MacKenzie can’t tell if he’s grieving or enraged or panicking. An overwhelming cascade of three, she supposes, each paralyzing him in their own way. Will lets out an irreverent sort of laugh, his shoulders dropping and bracing for impact.

The door to Will’s office bangs open, and less than a second later she hears Charlie’s voice loud and angry and clear—

“What in the fuck happened back there?”

 

* * *

 

Perhaps a sister, or one of his nieces or nephews. Maggie wasn’t inside the control room for the broadcast, but Will turning off his microphone to talk to Mac during the breaks and the terse phone calls he was making from the desk had the newsroom talking even before Will’s silent meltdown in the F-block. A family emergency, Maggie thought. The reckless rodeo star brother, the neurotic surgeon sister. The niece at college. The nephews who play football.

The phone at her desk rings precisely seven minutes after the end of the eight o’clock hour, and it’s the baby of the four siblings: Fiona, the Atlanta marketing executive who called once a week before Mac came back to New York, looking for updates about a brother who wouldn’t pick up his goddamn BlackBerry.

“Is he on the phone with Liz?”

The base of her chair squeaking, she turns towards Will’s office. She knows she saw Charlie head in there a few minutes ago, but she doesn’t know what’s happening. “No, he’s — actually I’m not sure what he’s doing right now. Mac hauled him into his office as soon as possible,” she says, then considers how that sounds. “I mean. You saw the show?”

“Some of it,” she answers, stilted.

Maggie’s only met Fiona in person once. Thanksgiving, 2009. More recently she’s seen her in _Forbes,_ all sharp bone structure and long limbs and soft blonde hair, wearing the same smirk that’s on Will’s face more often than not.

Swallowing hard, Maggie answers in a similar fashion. “Something happened?”

“Something happened.”

Fiona laughs, if a laugh can be bitter and exhausted and unsure.

“I could transfer you to his desk,” Maggie says, still trying to crane her neck for a good view into Will’s office. “Did you remember my extension, or did you ask the switchboard?”

“I remembered.” She hears a soft clacking noise over the line, as if Fiona was tapping her nails against the side of her phone. “We used to speak all the time, Magpie. Billy really needs to get a new assistant so I can go back to spying on him from a thousand miles away. I feel bad taking you away from your job.”

“I’m almost done for the night.”

Not really. Or at all. She has to head down to editing to help re-edit _News Night_ for the west coast showing in a few hours. But then she and Neal and Gary are going to get drunk. Or _were_ going to get drunk; she doesn’t know what happened in the McAvoy family but she has a suspicion it might keep her here longer than she intended if wayward relations keep calling her because Will won’t pick up his phone.

She should consider getting a new extension.

“Really?” Fiona asks in a tone that is both droll and surprised.

“No.”

They both snort.

After an uneasy pause, Fiona explains, “I wanted to catch him before the girlfriend honed in on the faint scent of familial calamity and decided to swoop in and use it to make Will the newest edition of New York cool.”

“Huh?”

“A heady mix of tragedy and brilliance.”

Her brows furrow together. “No, I mean, Mac would never—”

“Nina Howard?” Fiona interrupts, similarly confused. “What happened — did Will break up with Nina?”

_Fuck._

Plunging back into her six month tenure as Will’s assistant, Maggie bites her tongue and grimaces, attempting to walk back Will’s general non-communication with his youngest siblings. “No comment.”

Fiona scoffs. “Did he break up with Nina because of what happened to MacKenzie? Because Mickey and I were — of course he probably told Liz, but not us. We had to find out that he was dating Nina because it was in the tabloids.”

“To be fair, that’s how the senior staff found out too.”

That’s probably not any sort of consolation as a sister, but Maggie thinks that it might mean something. She’d mention that a picture in _Star_ was how Mac found out too, but she doesn’t want to lead Fi to ask questions about Mac.

Especially since fuck if _anyone_ can say what’s been going on with Will and Mac since they returned from Pakistan. Especially Will and Mac themselves.

“Is Will back with MacKenzie?” Fiona asks, voice pitching towards a level of excitement that would be nigh opposite on Liz.

But Maggie supposes that would just be Will and Liz’s childhood codependency.

She really does _not_ have the time.

Even if two-thirds of the McAvoy siblings still send her Christmas cards and the occasional email inquiring after her health and general state of being.

“I’m going to see if he’s — just hold on, Fi.” Without waiting for a response, she puts the call on hold.

Then braces herself, pushing back her shoulders and taking a deep breath before walking in the direction of Will’s office, thinking about how this was much easier when Will thought her name was Ellen or Karen and he was just a huge asshole who didn’t have time for anyone, even his baby sister and brother. Back when she knew nothing at all.

Gulping down air, she rocks back and forth on her heels at Will’s door.

Then knocks and pushes in.

“Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got Fiona on hold in the—”

His back to her, standing in the bathroom, and still in his clothes from the show, Will pulls his arm back and punches his fist through the mirror hanging over the sink.

MacKenzie screams.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
